This Hollow Valley
by Cat in the Window
Summary: Fem!Tony. Slight AU. "Humans are adaptable. Moving on isn't all that hard." Antoinette Stark stumbles her way through life.


I've never really been the type to gender-flip characters, but this idea, like my others, just refused to leave me alone. And when an idea won't leave me alone, I write about it. Where exactly this came from I had no idea, but (as a daughter with a brother) I feel like a parent's treatment can change along with gender of the child. And certain personality qualities change by gender too, as well the treatment you get from your parents.

Also, Stark's younger in this just because my image of a girl version looks a lot like Peggy if infused with Robert Downey Jr.'s genes (that sentence came out sounding wrong), which is a tad younger than mid-thirties. So, yeah. As if the plot hole with his age wasn't big enough. xD

This is a two-shot, by the way. One leading up to the Avengers/during it and one after. And I know his mom's Maria, but...well, it's AU already. And I got the parts of the background of his parent's death and the aftermath from a story called "Under a Thick Exterior" by Marilyn Cane (asked permission for it). It's awesome. Go read it.

Told in a while bunch of point of views. Just little snippets.

Never finished Iron Man II because my computer hates me, so this'll conveniently skip over most of it.

Anyway! Now that my mental little ramble is over and done with, disclaimer: all properties of _The Avengers _goes to Marvel, Joss Whedon, and whoever else worked on it.

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_The Father_

Howard's stuck in a Swiss airport the day his daughter is born, trying not to panic as he watches the snow steadily fall outside because he _knew _he shouldn't have come. Go, everyone had told him. She's not expected until April sixth, everyone said. But here he is anyway, waiting for his delayed plane to take off on March fifteenth while his wife is in the labor.

Life hates him, he decides. Life really, really hates him.

As he sits next to a fidgeting twenty-something-year-old on the stationary plane, he finds himself thinking up every horrible situation imaginable - what if his daughter is born with brain damage, what if Peggy won't stop bleeding, _what if she hates him for not being there_. That's a pretty big thing to miss, the birth of a child. And yet he's across the ocean, stranded by a snowstorm. Is this going to become a trend? Is he going to end up unable to go to any significant event in his family's life from now on? God, he hopes not.

Two hours after getting on, the plane final takes off, and the next eight it takes to get to LaGuardia are some of the most nerve racking of his life. Nearly the entire flight is hit by turbulence and though Howard's never been one to believe in fate, he's pretty sure this has to count as some sort of premonition. One that says, "You helped create a higher form of war? What else did you expect?"

All he can hope is that his daughter doesn't inherit this karma, too.

.

_The Mother_

They name her Antoinette Eliza, and some time after she turns three, she turns into Tony. The Y is from a typo on a birthday card sent by Howard's senile grandmother, and their daughter doesn't get that it's spelled wrong. She can read already, saw it once, and somehow it sticks. Peggy doesn't particularly mind, thinks it's cute even. And after two years of attempting in vain to change it, Howard eventually gives up.

On the night of her fifth birthday, only an hour after Peggy and Howard returned from an overly complicated meeting in Stockholm, the family of three finds themselves on the living room carpet. Tony's wearing a sundress she found for her in Saks a few weeks earlier, only given to her half an hour ago and though it looks adorable, the dress itself is meant for toddlers and still a little big. How they managed to have a daughter small for her age came as something of a surprise, since neither sides of the family have genetics for particularly small women. A doctor they talked to said it was because she was premature. Peggy lies down in next to her, pencil in hand as she shows her how to write in cursive. It's a relatively useless skill for this point in Tony's life, but normally she's either self-taught or Howard's helping her out, and it feels nice to be the one giving the lesson for once.

Even if it is her birthday.

"Why's my handwriting so bad?" she asks as she messes up on yet another G, though she has the vaguest hit on a lisp so the S sounds something like a TH instead.

"Everyone's handwriting is bad at your age," Howard answers, flipping through sales records and marking off information. He's distracted, but making an effort the way they've both had to lately.

"Mommy says your handwriting's really bad too."

He looked up from his work, staring at the two of the them, and she fights back a smile. "Peggy!"

Despite her struggle, she ends up laughing, the whole thing only made funnier by little Tony's utter bewilderment.

.

_The Father_

The mood swings start of the age of twelve and neither he nor Peggy have any idea what to do.

Luckily, she's not the type of get angry, but coming home and not knowing what mood they'd find her trapped in is as bad regardless. Sometimes she'll be hyper, talking a mile a minute about whatever she's working on and inquiring how they're doing and unable to sit still. Other times they'll find her, sitting almost unnaturally still and barely talking, a degree darker than merely sulking and apparently any creativity has stopped. What worries Howard the most, though, is when she seems to almost be in a mix between the two, unable to sit still and talking in small bursts in a way that suggestions unhappiness rather than the other way around before going silent for hours. On days like she doesn't acknowledge either of them much even though they all see each other rarely.

When she's thirteen, he brings it up to a friend of is who's a psychiatrist because after eight months he's pretty sure there's something wrong. Josh says it's just puberty, that he and Peggy don't see her enough to get the whole picture. Parental anxiety, he tells him, you're worried because you're a father and your little girl is growing up. Howard isn't too skilled in the people department so he takes Josh's word for it.

Something nags at him anyway.

.

_The Daughter_

The day before she leaves for MIT, her parents give her a list of commands.

"No boys," her dad says as she continues to pack her suitcase. "You're fifteen and it's illegal."

"No drinking either," her mom continues. "Remember, girls shouldn't get drunk around boys, whether said boys are also drunk or sober. It's a recipe for disaster. And it's illegal."

"Call us if something goes wrong...or if you panic."

"Do all your work."

"Don't go too far from campus on your own if you can help it."

Tony catalogs all of this in her head, planning to follow the first two and the fourth but the other two are still up in the air. She's fifteen, old enough to take care of herself and she doesn't have to run to her parents the moment something doesn't immediately go her way. Though she lets them baby her a little whenever they're home, she pretty adept at taking care of herself. Not that she _resents _them for being gone so much or anything (she gets that businesses don't run themselves and they've been very careful in never missing anything important); she'd just always hated relying on a nanny as a kid.

Her mom says, "Promise, Tony?"

"Promise," she answers, zipping her suitcase shut before turning around. "And I'm not going to _panic__, _Mom. It's going to be easy anyway."

Her parents exchange one of those frustrating looks that she doesn't quite understand. "Just keep it in mind," her dad tells her. "And pick up the phone when we call."

Rules aren't really her thing but she agrees anyway.

.

_The Mother_

She gets a call in the middle of a conversation with one of her husband's clients and politely excuses herself. The caller ID reads _Tony _and her daughter isn't the type to call when she knows her parents are in a meeting and quick check of the clock tells her she should still be in class. Trying not to sound too anxious, she picks up and says, "What's wrong, sweetie?"

"M-Mom?" Tony said, voice cracking and sounding distant. Peggy freezes. "I'm sick. Stomach virus."

Sick for Tony is not like sick for other people. Her health has almost been impeccably good and when she does com down with something, it's always horrible. Her last stomach virus ended up with her in the hospital with dehydration.

"Okay," she answers, tucking her hair behind her ear. "Don't worry, you'll be all right. We're coming to get you."

"T-thanks, Mom."

She hangs up without goodbye and Peggy can imagine her, curled up in a ball against a wall in her apartment's bathroom (underaged or not, a junior isn't allowed to dorm) or maybe the campus infirmary. More likely the latter. She exits her secluded spot near the pot of petunias and finds her husband quick enough. Though he's speaking with a colonel of the US army, which is always important, she feels justified when she taps on his shoulder and says, "I need to talk to you."

He excused himself and follows her into a stray, empty office. "What's the matter?" he asks.

"Tony has a stomach virus," she answers. "She wants us to come get her."

Normally, disaster or not, their daughter waits until she's sure they're free to call, or contacts Obadiah or another, closer member of Stark Industries. Skipping straight to her parents is serious.

"Right," Howard says because they only brought one car and happen to be three hours away from Cambridge. "It's wrapping up here anyway. I'm sure no one'll mind."

Peggy nods and follows him outside, biting her bottom lip with worry.

.

_The Orphan_

Tony's never been good with emotions, so she's never been good at making friends so despite seeing her parents rarely, they're the ones she's had to reply on, especially her mom. And she knows she's lucky to even have that. Dad always said she was his "little girl" after all, something that used to annoy her but right now it's all she wants to hear.

Needless to say, having them suddenly ripped from her life is more than just a little hard to deal with.

Two weeks later, after the funeral and recovery from sickness, she finds herself sitting in a psychiatrist's office. She's never been good at the whole people thing but gets of peg on this guy immediately. Though she wants to curl up in her chair, she doesn't want anyone to see her as vulnerable as she really feels. Except that she's not _really _vulnerable, of course. Humans are adaptable. Her parents are gone but she isn't and she needs to move forward as fast as she can.

This isn't something she needs a psychiatrist to tell her.

So she answers his questions with what he wants to hear. Makes it clear that it's not going to be long before she recovers but making sure to show a certain amount of emotion, even cries once. He buys it easy enough, and by the third meeting deems she's making progress. Under no circumstances does she want medication and she forces him to understand, finding out along the way that she's rather good at manipulation.

The appointments end within six months and she vows to never end up in a psychiatrist's office again.

.

_The Orphan_

Ten minutes after her graduation speech, something falls back into place and she realizes six months of her life is gone.

The last thing she remembers is saying goodbye at her psychiatrist's door and going back to somewhere that most definitely was not her apartment. She was living with someone - not a roommate - but she just graduated and is going off to live at her old home. How she made it through her past six months, how she kept up that perfect GPA and wrote an admittedly eloquent speech is something of a mystery. She's uneasy when she accepts her diploma not long after and stays confused when she meets up with Obadiah, the only one who bothered to show.

"Congrats, kid," he tells her and she can't remember when he started calling her that again. She's uncomfortable around him suddenly, not a good mixture with unexplained amnesia and it shows. "What's wrong?"

"I think I hit my head," she murmurs and it makes sense because it really does hurt. "I don't...can I go see a doctor?"

She ends up in the hospital soon after, still confused as she gets tested. The doctor gives the diagnosis of severe concussion, says it looks like she hit her head against a door frame or stair rail, mentions that amnesia is a common side effect. Tacks on at the end that there's evidence that she had sex too but there's no sign it was not consensual. She nods, wondering how she could lose her virginity and not remember a thing but she feels too awkward to ask. After she gets home, Obadiah asks if she wants to see someone about the amnesia.

She says no.

.

_The Assistant _

To be honest, the eighteen-year-old intimidates Pepper a little.

Logically she knows it makes no sense. Genius or not, Antoinette is four years younger than she is, shorter than she is by a good seven inches, skinnier than she is, and thousand times moodier. Maybe it's that someone so young and obviously inexperienced in the matter has control over the company, or that she can be shockingly cold-hearted and jaded in a way that no teenager ever should be. Or maybe it's the simple explanation that fuck, she's little more than a kid and designing technology that's sole purpose is killing people.

Yeah, it must be that.

So it's not surprising that somehow ends up a bit like a babysitter as well as PA, which is why four months into the job she finds herself in the girl's workshop at Mr. Stane's insistence. Apparently she's meant to remind Antoinette that human beings are meant to eat and sleep, something she assumed someone with an IQ higher than Einstein's should know.

"I'm fine," her boss says, completely ignoring her, focusing on the numbers on her computer screen instead. "Seriously."

"According to your AI, you haven't slept in seventy-three hours," Pepper says warily, and she didn't even know that was possible without becoming like Edward Norton from _Fight Club,_ "and nearly a week since you've had anything to eat."

It's understandably infuriating that Antoinette doesn't seem to care. "I've had a granola bar," she says, "and a plum. JARVIS, don't exaggerate."

The AI answers, "_It's not healthy for a young lady to eat so little. My calculations tell me that you will hit anorexia status if you keep continuing this pattern._"

Thankfully, this makes her pause. Seemingly almost uncharacteristically awkward, she she saves her work, closes the window, and turns around. "Do you like sushi, Ms. Potts?" she asks and surprised, she nods. "Awesome, there's this great place down the street. JARVIS, close everything down."

Three sushi rolls later and Antoinette becomes Tony and Pepper's new best friend.

.

_The Stranger_

Yinsen knows who Tony Stark is, same as anyone else who's ever turned on the news, but he's never actually seen a picture or real footage of the so-called "Merchant of Death." Finding out that Tony doesn't stand for Anthony and that Stark is, in fact, a twenty-five-year-old woman is surprising and deeply unnerving.

Right now the woman is sitting on a makeshift work bench, coughing up a seemingly endless amount of blood and water and struggling to breath and Yinsen doesn't know how many times they drowned her but she was gone for a very long time. He can't imagine that the sparking from live wires sticking out of her chest from the car battery he attached helped any. And he might be disappointed she agreed but he understands.

When she's gotten out all that she can, she looks up at him, and her face is colorless and those huge brown eyes of her lacking the resigned looked he expected. One of the wires sparks, her shirt still torn and revealing. He was embarrassed when he cut it open and profoundly relieved that her top was so small that he didn't need to cut into anything...indecent.

"I've got to fix this," she says, voice hoarse, and he doesn't understand what she means.

Half a week later and she's built herself a heart.

.

_The Survivor_

Tony doesn't know how to show what's really going on in her head and only two people in her life really seem to understand that. So it feels great when later, after she gets home and delivers a shocking press conference, after the doctor checks her out and calls her a miracle, Pepper wraps her arms around her and doesn't say a thing. She hugs back, burying her face into the taller woman's shoulder.

And she swears she doesn't cry.

.

_The Assistant_

Pepper might be Tony's friend, but she knows that there are boundaries. A lot of boundaries actually, because all it takes is for her to say one wrong thing and her friend closes up, reinforces all of her walls with systematic dependency. Even after seven years of her employment, she doesn't fully understand her. She acts like she apathetic to disaster, but at the same time just killed her stocks in order to destroy what Stark Industries is built on. She can pull off anything she wears better than a supermodel and knows it but still spends hours but will spend hours before going somewhere important making sure she looks perfect. And she's arrogant to the point of ridiculousness, because she's a genius and doesn't care about being modest about anything, but has a horrible tendency to randomly show an inferiority complex. Then there were those _mood swings _that she honestly had no idea how to deal with. The only thing about her that doesn't take any sort of guesswork is exactly how remarkably stubborn she is.

Most of her boundaries involve never pointing any of this out. But she's about to break one anyway.

After she meets up with Tony, who's in the process of fixing a few bugs in JARVIS' command created from three months of neglect, and they exchange pleasantries, she says, "I know you're upset about the company deciding that you have PTSD, but don't you think you should go for a psychological evaluation...you know, to prove them wrong?"

Tony crosses her arms and leans against the wall, the atmosphere in the room going sour in a millisecond. "I don't have PTSD," she says. "I haven't had a flashback, don't get nightmares - I'm fine. Honestly."

"You don't _sleep_."

"I never have."

She sighs, knowing this will probably go nowhere. "Look," she says, "you don't need to see a psychiatrist, but maybe a therapist can help. Just talk things over. You haven't really mentioned it to anyone."

"No reason to," her friend answers. "I'm fine and sick of you guys worrying about me. I got out, didn't I? And it's not like I have to be afraid. No one's coming after me or anything."

"Tony -"

"Pepper."

Not even a minute and the conversation's closed. That has to be a record. Though she wants to push, she knows that even she can only go so far, and leaves.

.

_The Friend_

It takes wheedling JARVIS for Rhodey to get inside the house, but he finds Tony immediately. She's in the lab as usual, a cup of coffee next to her and plans for something he can't understand on the screen. In the six hour interval from Stane's death until now, she cut her hair short, chopped it to her shoulders the way she did four months ago when she first came home.

"Isn't there somewhere you should be?" he asks and she's too preoccupied apparently to turn around.

With a shrug, she says, "Am I supposed to be?"

"I don't know," he answers. "Feels like you should." She doesn't answer, a quality about her that he's grown to hate over the years because they've been friends since she was nineteen and he still just doesn't get it. "You could - I don't know. The Board probably wants to see you."

It's a weak excuse and he knows it. "You don't need to be so passive," she tells him. "If you're here to ask how I'm holding up -" That's exactly why he's here. "- then you'll be happy to know I am."

"But -"

"I'm adaptable." This sounds like a repeat, but he can't remember her ever saying it before. "Moving forward isn't all that hard."

_She has trust issues_, a coworker once told him. _You shouldn't bother. The rest of us don't. _

"Are you sure?"

Again, she shrugs. "Why wouldn't I be?" she says. "The guy didn't like me. No need to care about someone who hates you, right? Are you here for anything else? Because I'm kind of working."

If he leaves her here alone, she probably won't come out for a while and when did that, she tended not to eat or sleep. "I'm bringing you out to dinner," he says. "C'mon, we'll go to that place in Little Italy that you like."

"Sure. Meet you outside in ten minutes."

He feels guilty as fuck when he ends up in bed with her a few hours later.

.

_The Fake_

Natasha makes it a point to grow no emotional attachments on a job and though she knows she should _hate _Antoinette Stark from just the woman's lack of caring alone (even without taking into a count that she has more flaws than good qualities) but she somehow ends up _liking _her instead. It doesn't make much sense since the woman's probably one of the least likable people she's met since she joined S.H.I.E.L.D., but she can't help it.

"Leopard print?" Stark says, quirking a brow when gets the information she wanted. "You've got to be kidding me. Drop any appointments for the day, we're going shopping."

"Wait - what?"

By the fault of utter vanity and judgmental personality, she's in a dressing room at some Fifth Avenue store with five party dresses on the wall. She should find an excuse not to buy an of them, but because of the nature of her job she's always had a weakness for nice clothes and everything in this store are just so nice.

By Stark's (or sorry, _Tony_) command she steps out of the dressing room after she gets on the first dress. It's purple and lacy, a color and style she normally avoids because both are too noticeable, but she's a PA right now, not a seductress so it's okay. "You look great," Stark says and for someone with blood poisoning who's probably in constant pain, she still has a knack for being cheerful. In a different situation, her ability to cover up everything would've made her a good undercover. "Totally your color. You should buy it. Don't worry about cost, I'll cover it."

There are five more equally stunning dresses in there, but she finds herself agreeing. She doesn't get to dress like this often and the others are closer to her usual type and she is supposed to play the part of Stark's friend so it all works out. That, or Natalie is starting to take over Natasha. She needs to contact Fury and soon.

.

_The Outsider_

Nick Fury thankfully leaves before he can see her emotional breakdown because it feels like her life's suddenly falling apart all over again. Not only had she come to terms with the fact that she was fucking dying and was perfectly fine with it (after all the bad shit she put into this world, she deserved it), but she just found out that first person she'd started to consider as a new friend in a long time was just pretending and that her dad created a new element to work with her on that she didn't find out about until _nine fucking years after he died. _

Yeah, thanks for that, Dad.

After a solid two weeks of being in a good mood - the longest stretch of time since Afghanistan - her emotional high plummets. At times like this she can't exactly think straight but here she is anyway, designing a new ARC reactor with the plans her dad made and didn't tell her because apparently she didn't know her parents as well as she thought. Sure, she might not have seen them as often as most kids did but she'd been under the impression that they were close. But if they were hiding this from here, what else had they kept secret? Was this just the way the rest of her life was going to be, let down by people she thinks she trusts until she has no one? Well, it's not like she doesn't deserve it and she doesn't need people. She's survived well enough without anyone for different stretches of her life.

And that's the thing: she likes solitude. She grew up with it. Normally this news wouldn't be so crushing but this negativity spell she's suddenly caught in keeping playing back everything horrible that's ever happened to ever, every betrayal she's ever dealt with, and bringing her understandable paranoia to the forefront of her mind, reminding her that there's a very large possibility that _no one _likes her. And if they do, it won't last forever.

Sometimes it easiest to never trust anyone.

.

_The Soldier_

Though he met the woman on the plane, Steve doesn't get a full view of Howard Stark's daughter until he's back on the flying ship. He didn't need to hear her name - _hadn't _heard her name at first - to know exactly who she was because she has her father's eyes. But besides that - well, besides that she looks an awful lot like Peggy but that might just be his imagination. She's smaller by several inches and about every other way too, looking more like a flapper than an the women he'd met in his life. Her clothes don't hide her body at all, showing very little skin but still clinging to every single curve of her body in the same way Miss Romanoff's did and no woman in the 40s would ever dream of doing.

If this bet was made a little earlier, he'd have to hand over another ten.

"That man's playing _Gallagher_," she says as she enters, immediately becoming the focal point of the room because everything about her demanded to be noticed in a way that most army captains could only dream of. "He thought we wouldn't notice, but we did."

They spoke on the plane, she proved she was reckless, so Steve was wary enough around her already, knew she'd be a hard person to lead. It doesn't help that ten minutes later, when she says, "Last night. Didn't anyone else do the reading?" she makes it clear to everyone her intellect's her weapon and on that ground, no one's her equal.

Steve doesn't like people with superiority complexes.

.

_The Director_

Nick Fury has never pretended to be a nice person and doesn't have much respect for people who are (Rogers is an exception), but even he thinks that Stark's, "Everything that's special about you came out of bottle," is a low blow. Sure, the woman makes him look like a nursery director in comparison and sometimes has the personality of a sociopath, but that was just...bad. Bad enough that Rogers forgets about the rule of boys don't hit girls and throws down the gauntlet - "Put on the suit, Stark."

In that moment he knows it'll take more than a little push to get this team to work.

Then everything goes wrong at once: Banner with the scepter, the damn engine exploding, his sharpest mind shooting a virus into the computer and Stark's too far away to fix it. When it all finishes - Loki escaped, Hawk back, his friend dead, the team scattered, and came very close to having the resident genius get torn apart by propellers, he sees that this is deeper shit than he thought. But he needs this done and he needs this done today, so he smears Phil's cards with blood and throws them down on the table.

"He had these in his pocket."

Hesitantly, Rogers reaches over to pick one up. Stark leaves and maybe bringing her in wasn't a good idea. Everyone he knows will pull through, will join together and fight, but Widow pegged her right: Tony Stark was too unpredictable to judge. Possibly too unpredictable to function. But she's necessary and he knows it and he has to trust that the six of them will put it together in the end.

.

_The Enemy_

Loki can see with relative easy that there's something similar between this little slip of a woman and himself - or at least as similar as an inadequate mortal can be in comparison to a superior god. If she wasn't so angry, he might even try to recruit her. Her "threatening" isn't particularly threatening at all, and he doesn't think it's meant to be. There must be another motive that brought her here because he knows only a simpleton ever has a single cause. Unfortunately for her, he doesn't plan on letting their little chat continue on long enough to learn what it is.

"Performance issues, you know?"

In disbelief he taps her heart again, hearing the sound of metal against glass. There's a smile on her face, little and pretentious and more of a smirk and he understands that _this _is the threat, that she took a gamble and succeeds. So he does the reasonable thing and throws her out the window.

.

_Antoinette Eliza_

Only six hours earlier she'd told Rogers, "I'd rather cut the wire," and she's pretty sure she just became the scissors.

She's carrying a nuclear missile into outer space, some place she's wanted to see since she was a little kid, ready to martyr herself for a world she's spent her life fucking up. It's ironic, really, since even the weapon she's holding is of her design, created not too long before she...stopped.

"_Would you like me to get Pepper on the phone, Ms. Stark_?" JARVIS asks her.

There's no one else to call and it's beyond selfish, forcing someone to hear her last words, but she needs to hear a friendly voice before she dies and she's never pretended to be selfless in the first place (even now, whether she does this or waits, she'll die either way so what's the point?). So she tells JARVIS to call, focusing her eyes on the portal.

But Pepper doesn't pick up and rather than a voice in her ear she dies with eyes her full of stars.

.

I was originally going to write two extra parts after this, but I really liked that last line. If you're confused as hell and didn't read the author's note on top, go skim it. It explains a lot.

Anyway! Second part coming up which is the aftermath and I think I'm actually going to do a pairing. It'll probably be Clint/Tony because that pairing doesn't get enough love. If you don't want that, suggest. The other possibility is Steve/Tony.

Review please! They're excellent motivators. :3


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